Resources

The Great Books Foundation is an independent, nonprofit educational organization whose mission is to help people learn how to think and share ideas.  Towards  this end, the Foundation publishes collections of classic and modern texts for children and adults,  and conducts training in the Shared InquiryTM method of discussion throughout the United States and abroad.

The mission of the Barbara Bush Foundation for Family Literacy is: To establish literacy as a value in every family in America, by helping every family in the nation understand that the home is the child's first school, that the parent is the child's first teacher, and that reading is the child's first subject; and to break the intergenerational cycle of illiteracy, by supporting the development of family literacy programs where parents and children can learn and read together.

Just One More Book!! is a wonderful site with podcast interviews with authors, illustrators and others involved in the book industry.

It is so delightful when you find someone who has written a piece on an issue which you might have been mulling over and find that they have written about it much better than you ever could have.

One of the issues motivating the establishment of Through the Magic Door has been to try and counteract the very large volume of unremittingly negative children's books that have come out in the past couple of decades. Some of these are wonderfully well written. Many have been award winners. But there are so many and they are so dark.

It makes you want to take up arms - Optimists of the World Unite!

I have just discovered an author, Barbara Feinberg, who has written a delightful piece which is an exploration of why our children are being burdened with all these negative novels. Please take a look at her article, Reflections on the "Problem Novel" which is adapted from her book, Welcome to Lizard Motel.

With her delightful essay, I can safely point to her words and restrain myself from ranting.

"The Parent-Child Home Program, a research-proven home visiting model, prepares young children for school success by increasing language and literacy skills, enhancing social-emotional development, and strengthening the parent-child relationship."

"Reach Out and Read (ROR) is a national non-profit organization that promotes early literacy by giving new books to children and advice to parents about the importance of reading aloud in pediatric exam rooms across the nation."

Dr. John Miller conducts an annual study of which cities in America are the most literate based on array of publicly available information. Some of the rankings just don't ring true based on my personal experience of travelling to many of these cities - and yet. Data exists to challenge our experiential assumptions. An interesting study. The most recent study is America's Most Literate Cities, 2006.

Mathematica Policy Research Inc. is a contractor that conducts a good deal of research on behalf of the Federal government on the efficacy of various health and educational programs. As such, they have a lot of research on many related childhood programs funded by the government.

The Florida Center for Reading Research was established by Governor Jeb Bush in January, 2002. It is jointly administered at Florida State University by the Learning Systems Institute and the College of Arts and Sciences.

The Florida Center for Reading Research Mission:
1. To conduct basic research on reading, reading growth, reading assessment, and reading instruction that will contribute to the scientific knowledge of reading and benefit students in Florida and throughout the nation.
2. To disseminate information about research-based practices related to literacy instruction and assessment for children in pre-school through 12th grade.
3. To conduct applied research that will have an immediate impact on policy and practices related to literacy instruction in Florida.
4. To provide technical assistance to Florida's schools and to the State Department of Education for the improvement of literacy outcomes in students from pre-K through 12th grade.

If you have not already seen this, The Humanities Resource Center has released an excellent study, The Humanities Indicator Prototype, which attempts to measure, as the name suggests, the nature of and degree of engagement between the humanities and the general culture. Follow the link to the main page.

Part V, The Humanities in American Life, is the section particularly pertinent to those of us focusing on the role of reading and children’s literature. In particular, Section A covers Adult Literacy, Family Literacy, and Book Reading.

This is an excellent collation of information from disparate sources and the general observations and conclusions map well to research we have been doing at Through the Magic Door which is more concentrated on these same trends but with particular focus on young people rather than the population at large.

The one element I do not see addressed is the degree of concentration of reading. Based on only two studies some years apart, it would appear to me that in the US, discretionary reading is highly concentrated. Approximately 50% of the population read nothing for pleasure in a given year, 40% of the population reads about 20% of the books consumed in a year and 10% of the population does approximately 80% of the discretionary reading. The closest the study comes to shedding light on this issue is measurement of levels of prose proficiency. The US comes ninth among twenty-two OECD countries (and ahead of all the big European countries such as UK and Germany) in terms of prose proficiency but it also has one of the most bi-polar distributions. 21% of the population reads at the highest level of proficiency and 21% reads at the lowest level. Three Scandinavian countries (four of the nine countries that are ahead of the US) have similarly high levels of the population reading at the most proficient level but are more effective at minimizing the percentage of the population reading at the lowest levels. For Sweden, Norway and Finland, 24% of the population reads at the highest literacy level (compared to the US’s 21%) but only 9% read at the lowest level (compared to the US’s 21%).
Other interesting findings in this report:

43% of the population read no books for pleasure in the prior 12 months. That figure is for 2002. More recent studies for the US that I have seen all hover around the 50% mark not having read a book in the prior 12 months. In Europe the corresponding figure tends to average 55% but with marked national and regional variations.

While overall voluntary reading has been declining for a number of years, the most marked declines are among the younger demographics. Between 1992 and 2002, voluntary reading declined from 59.8% to 51% for 18-24 year olds and from 63.8% to 58.4% for 25-34 year olds. Remember, this is a measure of people that read at least a single book.

All demographics showed an increase in the habit of daily reading to children in their household, increasing from 53% to 58% between 1993 and 2001. Households with the mother having a college degree education or higher (about 25% of the population) had the highest rates of daily reading to children at 73%.